Understanding the Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Usage of School Buildings in Greece Using an IoT Data-Driven Analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes IoT sensor data from Greek school buildings to assess how COVID-19 lockdowns affected energy use and building activity, revealing opportunities for energy efficiency improvements and insights into operational changes.

Contribution

It provides a data-driven analysis of school building usage during COVID-19 using IoT sensors, highlighting energy consumption patterns and operational insights during lockdowns.

Findings

Significant power consumption persisted during lockdowns.

IoT data can infer building activity and operational changes.

Potential for energy efficiency improvements in school buildings.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought profound change in the daily lives of a large part of the global population during 2020 and 2021. Such changes were mirrored in aspects such as changes to the overall energy consumption, or long periods of sustained inactivity inside public buildings. At the same time, due to the large proliferation of IoT, sensors and smartphones in the past few years, we are able to monitor such changes to a certain degree over time. In this paper, we focus on the effect of the pandemic on school buildings and certain aspects in the operation of schools. Our study is based on data from a number of school buildings equipped with an IoT infrastructure. The buildings were situated in Greece, a country that faced an extended lockdown during both 2020 and 2021. Our results show that as regards power consumption there is room for energy efficiency improvements since there was significant power consumption during lockdown, and that using other sensor data we can also infer interesting points regarding the buildings and activity during the lockdown.